Re: [PATCH 2/2] add: refuse to add paths beyond repository boundaries

From: Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 10, 2013, 13:38 UTC
Message-ID: <CALkWK0=_NAfOdVKet9k33ZuwAtcaZ42ok_r+Ln1rswcaJi6eTA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vehejsfpe.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano wrote:

> One can have symlinks to anywhere all one wants.  We track symlinks.
> [...]

Yes, I know. We store symlinks as blobs containing one line, the path to the file, without a trailing newline. And we have a mode for it to distinguish it from regular files.

What I meant is:

    echo "baz" >newfile
    cd foo/bar/quux
    ln -s ../../../newfile
    cd ../../..                    # Back to toplevel
    git add foo/bar/quux/newfile

This is allowed.  While:

    cd foo/bar/quux
    echo "baz" >newfile
    cd ../../..                    # Back to toplevel
    ln -s foo/bar/quux
    git add quux/newfile

is disallowed.  Then again, if we were to replace the last line with:

    cd quux
    git add newfile

and it works.

Notice that both symlinks are pointing to paths inside out repository, and the only difference is that the second example attempts to add a path with a symlink as the non-final component. The path is not pointing "outside" our repository, as the function name would indicate.

Anyway, it's just a minor detail that would be nice to fix in the future. Nothing urgent.